Are left handed people smarter? false or true!

As is so often the case with social science research, the frustrating answer is "it depends."

But there are certain cognitive domains where left handed people do seem to excel. One such area is called "divergent thinking," or the ability to generate new ideas based on existing information.

That's according to 1995 research by psychologist Stanley Coren, which was cited more recently in a New Yorker article. Coren conducted several experiments that suggest left-handedness is associated with superior divergent thinking, at least in men.

In one experiment, nearly 1,000 men and women had to think of ways to combine two commonplace objects not typically used together, like a pole and a tin can. In another, participants had to organize a series of words into as many different categories as possible.

Results showed that left-handed men performed better on these measures of divergent thinking than right-handed men — although there was no such difference for women

The question is: Are left handed people smarter?

The idea that left-handed people are more intelligent than right-handers is a myth. There have been lefty geniuses in history like Leonardo da Vinci, but this is not part of a larger pattern. If anything, the opposite is true. In 2015, Dutch researchers combined the results from over 30 previous studies involving over half a million people and found no link between handedness and verbal ability and a small advantage for right-handers in terms of spatial ability. Another recent study based on data from tens of thousands of people actually found that left-handedness was more common among people with very low IQ than among people with typical IQ.